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Tuesday, 25 November 2014

Hybrid Threats: All the Rage

London, United Kingdom.
25 November. They call it Rage; a newly-discovered malware programme
that is perhaps the most advanced malicious spyware yet discovered. Here in London according to people who know
about these things the purpose of Rage
is to gather intelligence by penetrating highly-protected computer systems. The strange thing about Rage is not that it exists but rather its provenance. Its signature seems to belong not to China
or Russia as one might expect these days, but a Western intelligence agency as
yet unspecified. The latest revelation adds yet more spice to a growing sense
here in London of a country under siege from a broad panoply of so-called ‘hybrid’
threats. My purpose here is to attend a
IISS meeting to consider ‘hibridity’, the latest buzz-phrase in the insecurity
foment. ‘Hybridity’ implies the use of
all possible civil and military means to threaten all possible people in all
possible places thus undermining the essential ‘contract’ between societal
protection and power projection upon which security and defence is
established. What’s new?

As I arrived at London
City Airport Home Secretary (Interior Minister) Theresa May was warning Britons
that the police and intelligence agencies can no longer cope with the scale and
sophistication of the many terror attacks being planned against Britain. She called for sweeping new powers to combat
the threat posed by Al Qaeda or Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack which
she regards as more dangerous than “at any time since 911”.

It is certainly the
case that the lexicon of new terms beloved of the security community has
proliferated. Indeed, if one listens to
language of conflict one could be tempted into thinking disaster is
imminent. Russia’s 2014 invasion of
Ukraine saw Moscow’s use of ‘ambiguous warfare’ for strategic ends. There is a ‘super-insurgency’ in the Middle
East that both threatens the regional state structure and risks destabilising
an already destabilised British society. ‘Cyber warfare’ threatens to fry
‘critical national infrastructures’ reducing society to anarchy. And, growing ‘geopolitical hyper-competition’
points to a strategic environment in which friction abounds and big war no
longer an impossible nightmare. All imply
a world increasingly beyond and out of control.

However, stand-back a
moment. Yes, all the conflicts share
common twenty-first century factors that magnify insecurity, such as mass and
social media, the twenty-four hour news cycle and the Kommentariat, and the growing paranoia of open, instable societies.
And yet peek through the dynamic language of threat, break down each conflict
and the threats become not only recognisable but manageable.

Russia’s aggression
against Ukraine represents a classic exploitation of political division for
strategic ends. Moscow is using proxies reinforced
by a disinformation and strategic communications campaign reinforced by use of Russian
forces to consolidate territorial gains.
The super-insurgency in Syria and Iraq takes place against the backdrop
of a regional state structure in turmoil.
However, Islamic State is in
fact a classical Sunni insurgency that General Gordon would have recognised at
Khartoum in the late nineteenth century.
The stalled negotiations in Vienna over Iran’s nuclear ambitions reflect
Tehran’s regional-strategic ambitions and classical geopolitics albeit
nuclear-tipped.

All three conflicts
would have been recognised by Britain’s forebears for what they are and the
tools and instruments available to past London would have been shaped
accordingly and applied proportionately. The problem is that the tools have been
denuded and the structures designed to cope with multiple, simultaneous threats
have withered. In such a situation
political leaders conscious of their own strategic failure are happy to accord
such conflicts the radical appellation ‘hybrid’ because it implies an exoticism
and complexity that does not in fact exist.

The danger is that
terms such as ‘hybrid’ become a metaphor in an ever-changing lexicon of threat for
an inability of government to grip complexity and establish sound strategy
thereafter. It is a metaphor reflective
of an acute inability to act and the deepening policy paralysis in increasingly
dysfunctional societies of which Britain has become a sad example. ‘Hybrid threats’ by definition demand of a
state a comprehensive security concept, i.e. joined-upness, at which contemporary
states such as Britain are not very good at.
Faced with such dysfunctionality terms such as ‘hybrid’ becomes a
catch-all, full of meaning and yet meaningless, generating more heat than light,
more politics than strategy.

Western governments
must go back to the fundamental principles of sound security; intelligence-gathering,
analysis, deterrence, defence and interdiction.
Each scenario must be carefully and sufficiently analysed and properly-considered
so that the vital balance between protection and projection can be adapted,
reinforced and maintained. Only then
will the balance between security and liberty, efficiency and effectiveness be
properly re-established.

There can be no doubt
that the shifting balance of power, emerging technologies and radical belief
systems do pose a real threat to societies changed beyond all recognition to
the one into which I was born. Indeed, in the space of my lifetime Britain has
gone from being one of the most secure and stable of developed societies to one
of the most insecure and unstable. Some
of this is the inevitable consequence of technological change. Rage is but the latest attack emerging
from the “Internet of Things” to which open society is vulnerable.

‘Hybrid threats’ are certainly
real but they are not as new as their advocates would suggest. Rather, the danger is that
‘hybridity’ become a kind of lazy shorthand for security inadequacy that loads
different and differing types and forms of conflict into a misleading buzz-phrase. Such ‘laziness’ not only affects planning and
response but could lead to a form of panic as threats are combined and then
aggregated. If that is the case
‘hybridity’, which is all the rage amongst security wonks, would reflect more an
unwillingness to grip complexity than combat the very real threats implied
therein. That in turn would be a failure
of strategy, policy and imagination.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.